Whatever the austerities of his fiction, he composes narratives with more or less developing characters and something like a subject or a content. The atmosphere of dream that so pervades much of his work is pointedly purposeful, bespeaking psychic dislocation or evoking a sense of entrapment that has some discernible relation to circumstance. When he fails, one is aware of a gap between intention and execution, aura and substance, of the disparity, say, between the intensity of nightmarish dread and the causes that might account for it. Hawkes's novels demand to be read and considered in such terms. Absurdity figures prominently in the novels, but Hawkes nowhere -728- relies on it as an ostensibly adequate "explanation" for anything. Though he demands a responsively attentive reader, he does not expect what William Gass "a jaded eye," which is to say, a reader "for whom all the action, the incidents, the tension and suspense, are well-known and over and dead and gone," the reader, as Gass has it, of "Joyce and Beckett and Barth and Borges." Hawkes's reader is eager to be moved, willing to be wracked by suspense ...»

Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and ReaderPart Two, updated with many new readings addressing current issues, offers a diverse collection of provocative essays from both the popular and scholarly medium.1809 руб 2005 год 784 стр. мягкая обложка